Dear CeCe and others,
Below is the 2nd part of my summary about the conference.

Sincerely,
Tim Janzen

Elliott Greenspan discussed enhancements that had either
been recently implemented on the FTDNA web pages or planned enhancements for
the future. The next upgrade to the web pages will include the addition of
microallele Y STR values. Michael Hammer's lab in Arizona has microallele
values for FTDNA customers going back to 2001 and so that data will soon be
able to be displayed on the project web pages. The STR values will also
adhere to the NIST standards as of the next update. The Illumina autosomal
data for people who have done the Family Finder test will include about 3000
more SNPs in the next update after the conversion to Build 37 of the Human
Reference Sequence. Family Finder will also have an advanced matching
feature in which you can look for FF matches who also are mtDNA or Y STR
matches with you.
Thomas Krahn summarized the latest Roche 454 sequencer Y
chromosome sequencing results. He is doing Y chromosome enrichment of the
DNA prior to sequencing so that he can maximize the Y chromosome sequence
data from each sequencing run. In his latest run he tested 8 samples, but
only 2 came out reasonably well. He plans to reduce the number of beads he
uses in the sequencer and he hopes that will improve the quality of his
data. In the latest experiment he got about 19,000 reads from one sample,
of which about 48% of the reads were from the Y chromosome after Y
enrichment. The average read length was in the 400-600 base pair range.
Thomas plans to put the latest sequencing results on his FTP server as a
downloadable file of about 300 million megabytes of data for Y SNP hunters
to review. Thomas plans to continue to work on Y sequencing until he can
perfect the sequencing. Thomas said that there are about 20 million base
pairs on the Y that are worthwhile sequencing. The first 2 million base
pairs on the p arm are pseudoautosomal and thus aren't helpful from a Y SNP
search prospective. The palindromic regions also generally don't have many
Y SNPs. The new 454 sequencer will allow about 20 times as many bases to
be sequenced as can be done with the WTY project currently. Now the WTY
results generally include about 400,000 base pairs. Thus Thomas anticipates
at least 6-8 million base pairs of the Y chromosome can be sequenced with
the new 454 sequencer in the short term and hopefully about 20 million base
pairs can be sequenced in the long term.
Peter Hrechdakian gave an overview of the very important
Armenian project, which now has over 600 people in it. Armenia and the
nearby regions in the Caucasus are the cradle of many Y haplogroups and thus
additional testing of people from this region is very important. Peter's
presentation included many excellent diagrams and graphs summarizing the
mtDNA, Y, and autosomal data from the Armenian project.
Peter Briggins gave a thorough review of the FTDNA Clan Colla
Null 425 project at http://www.familytreedna.com/public/clancolla425null.
This clan is thought to have descended from the 3 Colla brothers who lived
ca 400 AD in Ireland. There are quite a few different Irish surnames in
this group. All members of this project are R-L21+ and every member who has
tested has also been discovered to be R-DF21+.
Dick Hill gave a heartwarming presentation describing how he
discovered the identity of his biological parents over a period of many
years. A combination of Y chromosome and autosomal DNA testing helped him
prove that his biological father was a Mr. Doug Richards.
David Pike summarized the phasing tools he has available on his
web site at http://www.math.mun.ca/~dapike/FF23utils. In particular, I
enjoyed his discussion of microdeletions of autosomal DNA segments, which
can generally found by checking for discordant data.
Dr. Stephen Morse discussed many of the "one step" tools that he
has available on his web site at www.stevemorse.org. It had been some years
since I had last visited his web site and I was pleased to learn that he has
added some DNA tools to his web site, including a genetic distance
calculator. Some other web sites he mentioned that can be helpful for
finding living people include www.PrivateEye.com and www.ZabaSearch.com.